With the increased use of digital cameras, Web site image files, home video editing files, sound files, and other types of user media content stored on a hard drive, there is a clear need to provide a scheme to manage and more efficiently access these files. It is common for users to create a number of different folders at scattered locations on one or more hard drives to hold clip art, digital camera photos, video files and other types of image and sound media files. While the prior art includes programs that search a user's hard drive to identify media files for inclusion in a common listing or index, an efficient technique for automatically creating a hierarchical collection of the media-specific files has not previously been developed. In the past, users have been required to import personal content into an organizer program and manually input keywords and other metadata parameters that would enable a user to subsequently access a desired type or category of media file, or a specific media file.
Once all of the media files on a user's system are indexed and associated with keywords and other identifying metadata, it becomes relatively easy to locate a group of related media files or a specific media file. However, creating such an index and manually entering keywords and other metadata that will then enable the efficient access of media files becomes a daunting task that may involve many hours of a user's time. For this reason, most users are reluctant to take the time necessary to index and enter metadata for media files. As a result, media files are often misplaced, or at the very least, are difficult to locate on most users's hard drives. Without a centralized index and the ability to search through hundreds of media files based on metadata, a user can spend considerable time locating desired media files. The user must locate each potential folder in which one or more desired media file might be stored and then visually search through the files stored therein. While this task may require much less time than manually entering metadata, it is typically repeated so many times that the cumulative time lost can be much greater than that needed to index the files.
Even after a user's media files are manually indexed and associated with metadata, the user must still periodically update the indexing and associate new media files with metadata. This maintenance function also requires considerable time and effort. Accordingly, it will be apparent that an automated technique for both indexing and associating keywords and other metadata with media files on an ongoing basis would be desirable, since the user would then not need to manually implement this task, and would benefit from being able to readily locate one or more desired media files among all of those stored in various folders on the user's computer system. As new media files are stored, it would be desirable to automatically add the files to the index scheme and include the corresponding metadata that will enable a user to find the files when desired. Furthermore, the index scheme should be relatively simple, hierarchical, and avoid including unnecessary path information that relates to the location of non-media files.